This iPhone 7 Plus looks like it time travelled from 1987

Right now on the Apple Store website, you can buy an iPhone 7 in rose gold, gold, silver, black or jet black. Conspicuously missing from Apple’s colour wheel since the 1980s is beige. No matter how much money you have to throw away on aesthetics, you cannot buy a beige iPhone. Until now.

ColorWare has just launched the iPhone 7 Plus Retro edition for people who don’t just have more money than sense, but have such a discrepancy between the two that they wouldn’t fit on the same line graph. Before I reveal exactly how much they’re charging for it, though, let’s take a moment to marvel at its beauty:

Now let’s slowly turn over that price tag and… WOAH. $1,899 (~£1,539). Okay, putting it back now, being super-careful not to drop it.

To be entirely fair to ColorWare, the company has gone for the second-most expensive iPhone 7 available – the 256GB iPhone 7 Plus. I say second-most, because they’ve hand painted the details on top of it, and presumably the finish of the pricey jet black version would get in the way. All the same, the base iPhone costs $969 (~£785), which means you’re paying a whopping $930 (~£754) for the paint job.

You may be wondering if anyone will buy one at that price, and the answer is almost certainly yes. Last year’s iPhone 6s retro repaint cost only a little less, and is marked as sold out on the site.

If you’re interested, they’re being sold in limited numbers, with the first 25 getting a handwritten number of authenticity. It dispatched in two to three weeks, meaning it will be even more retro by the time it reaches your hands.

While we’re on the subject of retro Apple products, it’s buyer’s remorse time. A PowerBook cost $2,300 back in 1991. If you had put that money into Apple shares instead, they’d be worth $158,243 today. I’m going to go out on a limb here and suggest that a similar gamble with ColorWare won’t bring the same dividends – but will almost certainly end up with egg on my face now I’ve written it down for the whole world to see.

Still, if you don’t invest and buy a retro iPhone 7 Plus, at least your Macintosh Apple Watch charging stand will look less out of place.